


The night before christmas

by Perishthethought



Category: objectum - Fandom
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:14:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28209651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perishthethought/pseuds/Perishthethought
Summary: The night before christmas, and all through the- Ribbit.A holiday gift for a close friend of mine, I hope you enjoy this, Happy Hannukah and Merry christmas, sorry this is so late!
Kudos: 1





	The night before christmas

Walking through the mall this time of year was miserable for Jason. He had headphones in and sunglasses on but still felt overstimulation encroaching on his mind like a rapidly tightening noose. It wasn’t pleasant most days, but during the holidays? An absolute nightmare. Jason just needed to buy one thing for his friend and then get out. Unfortunately he was a little lost and the hot topic was unreasonably well hidden. Honestly he could’ve forgiven that if it wasn’t his third attempt at purchasing this specific item. He’d tried to order online but found it was an in store exclusive, so grumbling he’d gone to the mall nearest his home, but of course he found them completely out of stock. This was the second mall today which had been completely decked out in twinkling light, and was playing carols so loudly that he could still hear them clearly with his supposedly noise reducing headphones. He passed a spencers which gave him a glimmer of hope, and made him quicken his pace down the aggressively flashing hallway, the mall itself had lights on the ceiling that blinked in time with the music playing, Jason had noted this upon entering the building and now made a mental note to never, come back. About halfway down the hall he couldn’t take the flashing lights anymore and ducked into a store. It was brightly lit, but pleasantly not playing any music. He looked around the walls and found them covered with christmas ornaments.   
Jason sighed and took a deep breath, deciding to walk around the perimeter of the store to take a break from the auditory onslaught that had taken over the rest of the building. Walking slowly around the store he took in the sights, noting with more than a hint of pleasure that the rows of ornaments were organized by color and then by size. He gravitated towards the green section, wondering what he could find in his favorite color. He didn’t really need an ornament, hell he didn’t even have a tree, wouldn’t make much sense for a Jewish man to have one he told himself, even if he strongly considered buying one to deck out in blue and white. He had resisted though, taking a sense of pride from his strong will. Jason, like any man with plans, was about to make god laugh. He had made eye contact with a frog. More specifically, a frog ornament. It was made of shiny, hard plastic, and wearing a little top hat which was made of felt. frozen in a polite tipping of said hat. Jason was enchanted, delighted and oddly nervous all at the same time. Before he could even consider if this was a “necessary purchase” he was sitting at home playing with the ornament, with no gift for his friend.

The next morning, sunrise came through the windows, flooding the room to find Jason in one of those positions. The kind that the person in them swears up and down is perfectly comfortable, but looks like the result of a tragic accident to onlookers. He was dangling off the edge of the couch, limbs akimbo. The only sign that he was awake was his brown eyes, turned golden by the sunlight following the slow spin of the frog ornament that he had hung on the lamp that loomed, unlit next to the couch. Jason wasn’t really sure what enchanted him so much about the ornament, maybe it was the jaunty hat, or the polite smile or even the way the ornament gently swayed in some imperceptible breeze. Suddenly Jason sat up, or rather, he would have sat up if he’d been reclining like a normal person, as it was he flailed wildly and fell off the couch, landing in a heap onto the floor. 

He dug through the drawer carefully for what felt like the millionth time, but actually was barely the third. He knew he had a ouija board and he was fairly certain it was in this drawer. Maybe under the socks? He lifted the socks. Well he found his missing passport, but no ouija board. Jason cursed himself for buying the foldable “easy to store” option, he should have learned ages ago that easy storage meant easy to lose. Groaning he flopped himself back onto his bed, which was really more of a pile of blankets that hypothetically had a mattress under them. He rolled onto his side and bumped his face uncomfortably against something hard and flat. For a split second Jason thought he had found his missing board but instead it was his missing sketch book. He opened it and flipped through the first few pages absentmindedly. Stopping on a particularly gorey (for him) image, it was labelled ‘Charlie’ at the bottom of the page. Jason was momentarily taken aback with simply how long ago he had drawn that image, it had been when the charlie charlie challenge was all his friends wanted to talk about, they had convinced him to abandon his usual cutesy style to try and draw charlie himself. While reflecting on the challenge and the nature thereof, Jason had a great idea.   
Hours later, which was a frankly embarrassing time to write yes/no in four squares on a piece of printer paper, but in Jason's defense he got distracted, made lunch and changed his printer ink, but that had been needed for at least a month. The point being that, by the time Jason was sitting down to actually use his creation, morning had turned into afternoon and he was beginning to get tired. But nonetheless he persisted, sitting on the floor with the board in front of him, the ornament dangling from one of his fingers, held by the gold string.   
“Okay so…. Froggy Froggy are you here?” Jason tried, chuckling slightly at the absurdity of his statement. The frog swung decisively across the yes line.   
“Well I guess that makes sense I am holding you… Okay, Do you have a name?”  
No.  
“Would you like one?”  
Yes  
“Are you a boy?”  
No  
“Are you a girl?”  
No  
“Okay… What kind of name do y- oh wait only yes or no… Do you want it to be christmas themed?”  
No  
“That’s fair, I don't know a ton of christmassy names honestly. Puns? Do you like puns” The frog excitedly swung from yes to yes.  
“Well you seem pretty happy about that… What about Hoppy? You know, cause you’re a frog?”   
Yes.   
Over the next few days Jason and Hoppy worked on learning to communicate, Jason eventually found his missing ouija board, and learned that Hoppy had horrible spelling, so even with the edition of words other than yes and no, communication still took a hot minute to decode. Hoppy said they found it very frustrating to have to wait for Jason to understand what they had said. Eventually they were able to work out a way to make things a bit easier, Jason used his spare time to make flashcards of words that came up often, and carefully laid them out in a grid on each page of a composition notebook, each page featuring a next page square. As the days crept past, christmas was on the horizon, Jason had given up on finding the item he wanted to give his friend, and ordered something to be delivered to them so he wouldn’t have to bother with wrapping it. For his own self, Jason was six nights into hanukkah and, while he was fine on his own, he quite enjoyed spending the holiday with Hoppy. Hoppy couldn’t spin the dreidel themselves, but still enjoyed winning when Jason spinned for them. Hoppy couldn’t eat the chocolate of course, but still enjoyed winning nonetheless. Hoppy also watched from the handle of a cabinet as Jason tried his best to make Latkes on his own. It was comfortable, like having a silent, small, green roommate. Hoppy had even found that spinning in place got Jason’s attention to pick them up and bring out the communication book. All in all, life was good. But Jason had noticed that Hoppy was seeming glummer and glummer as the days crawled past.  
“What’s wrong, Hoppy?” he asked one night, holding the slowly swaying frog over the ouija board. Hoppy slowly and painstakingly spelled out a single word, “Purpose” before stilling and refusing to say anything for the rest of the evening. Jason spent awhile considering what that could mean. Even trying to check if it had been misspelled and could have meant something else, but Hoppy had fallen silent. He say quietly, staring at Hoppy, who was hanging listlessly for what felt like an eternity, the gears in his brain slowly but surely turning. He finally struck upon an idea. He jumped to his feet with more speed than was really necessary, “I’m going out!” He yelled to Hoppy, much more loudly than needed. He quickly stuffed his feet into shoes and grabbed the first coat he saw before making a mad dash out the door. He thankfully had his keys on his belt loop and had forgotten his wallet in his car. He realized as he was speeding down the street towards the nearest walmart that the rush was unnecessary, the winter months had tricked him into thinking it was the dead of night, when really it was only six o’clock.   
Pulling into the parking lot Jason groaned at the onslaught of cars. It looked like the entire world had thought ‘I bet everyone else knows better than to go shopping the night before christmas’ and been horribly wrong. He considered just giving up and going home, but steeled himself, Hoppy needed him. Jason had decided that the best course of action (as he was driving around looking for a parking spot in the utter hell that was christmas eve retail) was to go in through the garden entrance, grab the nearest tree he could find and run for checkout as fast as possible. Of course, nothing in life could ever be so simple.   
It’d been an hour. Jason had grabbed the tiny tree in less than five minutes, but he’d been in line for an hour trying to pay. He’d even gone to the express line, but the person in front of them had three carts FULL and were arguing that yes, their toddler was a seperate customer. Jason had buried his head in his hands, and was suppressing the urge to use the tree as a battering ram to escape into the relative peace of the parking lot. Finally he heard the sweet siren call of “Fine, your total is…” his heart leapt for joy.  
Getting the tree set up was surprisingly the hardest part. He had thought it was just going to pop out of the box fully formed, but no, there was assembly required. He found an alan wrench in the box, but couldn’t figure out what it was meant to do for the life of him. There were no instructions whatsoever. The tree seemed to be in only two parts, the actual tree bit, and then some sort of little base that had an unexplained power cord attached to it. He plopped the tree onto the base apprehensively. Nothing seemed wrong, it wasn’t going to fall over at any rate. He plugged in the cord but nothing happened. Jason turned the tree around in circles looking for a button or a switch or anything at all. His search was futile, but he did notice that Hoppy was wiggling excitedly on the lamp. He picked them up and held the little frog ornament up so that he could see eye to eye, noticing with a small hint of satisfaction that their hat was still in perfect condition, despite being handled so regularly.   
“I dont know if I’m supposed to say something, I’ve never had a tree before, or any ornaments to hang on one, but I hope you like it,” he said, gently placing his small friend near the top of the tree. Hoppy spun slightly, before settling down. Jason swore they looked happier than usual.   
“Merry Christmas, Hoppy,” and somewhere, deep in the back of his mind, Jason heard a very small  
“Happy Hanukkah, Jay,”


End file.
